The Novel of tomorrow and the scope of fiction

THE NOVEL
of TOMORROW

AND THE SCOPE
OF FICTION

SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS

MARY AUSTIN

JAMES BRANCH CABELL

FLOYD DELL

WALDO FRANK

ZONA GALE

JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER

HARVEY O'HIGGINS

ROBERT HERRICK

HENRY KITCHELL WEBSTER

WILLIAM ALLEN WHITE

EDITH FRANKLIN WYATT

C^&«^/f

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

AND

The Scope of Fiction

THE NOVEL

''of

TOMORROW

AND THE SCOPE OF FICTION

By Twelve
American Novelists

03-

INDIANAPOLIS

THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1922

By The New Republic

Copyright, 1922

By The Bobbs-Merrill Company

Printed in the United States of America

PRESS OF

BRAUNWORTH & CO.

BOOK MANUFACTURERS

BROOKLYN, N. Y.

NOTE

The articles in this volume first ap-
peared in a supplement to The New
Republic of April 12, 1922, on "The
Novel of Tomorrow and the Scope of
Fiction." Thanks to the suggestion of
The Bobbs-Merrill Company and to
the generosity of the several contribu-
tors, they now reappear in book form
for the benefit of the Authors' League
Fund for writers in distress. A few
changes and corrections have been
made. We regret that previous ar-
rangements on their part prevent the
inclusion of Willa S. Gather's "The
Novel Demeuble" and Theodore Drei-
ser's "The Scope of Fiction."

The Editors, The New Republic.

CONTENTS

PAGE

Apollyon vs. Pollyanna —

Samuel Hopkins Adams 3

The American Form of the Novel —

Mary Austin ll

A Note on Alcoves —

James Branch Cabell 25

The Difference Between Life and Fiction —

Floyd Dell 39

The Major Issue —

Waldo Frank 51

The Novel of Tomorrow —

Zona Gale 65

The P'rofession of Novelist —

Joseph Hergesheimer 75

The New Novel —

Robert Herrick 91

A Note on the New Novel—

Harvey O'Higgins 105

A Brace of Definitions and a Short Code —

Henry Kitchell Webster 113

Splitting Fiction Three Ways —

William Allen White ....... 123

"Dreaming True" —
Edith Franklin Wyatt . ... . ...... 137

APOLLYON VS. POLLYANNA
Samuel Hopkins Adams

THE NOVEL

OF

TOMORROW

I

APOLLYON VS. POLLYANNA

The scope of fiction? Why
"scope"? The word implies breadth
of choice and treatment, and that in
an art already dangerously subversive
of the present age's vitalizing prin-
ciple of conduct, benevolent censor-
ship. That way peril lies.

Let us endeavor to approach this
subject from the view-point of that
admirable organization, so represen-
tative of our best and most decorous
minds, the League for the Promotion
of Prudery. As the League points out
3

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

in its introductory enunciation of
principles, the error and sin of mod-
ernist literature is that it tends to por-
tray life as it is. All respectable per-
sons realize that life in many of its
phases is wholly unfit for the consid-
eration of the pure. Take, for ex-
ample, the regrettable matter of birth
and all that precedes it. If our novel-
ists, playwrights and publicists would
unanimously agree to refrain from
any mention of natal or pre-natal pro-
cesses, is it too much to hope that we
could presently raise up a generation
which should retain its unsullied men-
tal innocency until, let us say, the
legal age of twenty-one, or even con-
ceivably later? Leave these undesir-
able matters to the biologists. No-
body reads biology anyway.

It is gratifying to note that the great
and virtuous commonwealth of Penn-
sylvania has already initiated the good
work by barring from its motion pic-
ture theaters any indication of how
population is maintained. A young
4

APOLLYON VS. POLLYANNA

couple, though they be pasted over
with marriage certificates thick as
hotel labels on a bargain-sale trunk,
may not be shown in the provocative
act of purchasing a perambulator for
a prospective baby. Even that galli-
naceous makeshift, the stork, is ban-
ished from the screen. Ohio is not far
behind. A publisher who ventured to
invade its unsullied borders with an
edition of Rabelais has been appre-
hended. In this propitious soil the
League for the Promotion of Prudery
is quietly working to have the Bible
expurgated and the Talmud revised.
Shakespeare must go.

Eventually as public support ac-
crues to the League and after it has
cleansed and disinfected fiction,
poetry and the drama, it purposes to
direct its attention to art and jour-
nalism.

It must not be inferred that all
imaginative creation, per se, is inter-
dicted. Writers may still hold the
mirror up to nature, provided nature
5

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

is suitably clad. Modern fashions are
regarded as impermissible.

While the growing strength of cen-
sorship is a profound satisfaction and
encouragement to the truly upright, it
is evident that this method can never
go far enough. A complete Index Ex-
purgatorius is the eventual aim, or
better still, an hidex Prohibitus.
Thus far there has been devised only
a broadly modeled White List here-
with presented for consideration.
Stories, plays and poems are to be re-
garded as allowable in the following
classes :

(a) Political and business stories
wherein honesty triumphs.

(b) Sunday-school stories.

(c) Children and farm stories.

(d) Love stories; object, matri-
mony.

(e) Nature stories, though it must
be remembered that some animals are
coarse in their habits.

It is the League's plan to license
only such authors as subscribe to the
6

APOLLYON VS. POLLYANNA

restrictions above. Others will be for-
bidden publication. Can any genu-
inely artistic heart fail to thrill at the
prospect of a brighter, cleaner, purer
world, wherein all the books will be
of the school of Harold Bell Wright or
Gene Stratton-Porter; wherein Apoll-
yon and all his legions of darkness
will flee before Pollyanna with her
forces of sweetness and light?

THE AMERICAN FORM OF THE
NOVEL

Mary Austin

II

THE AMERICAN FORM OF THE
NOVEL

The novel has always concerned it-
self with such incidents of the life
performance as have been found sig-
nificant by the age in which they oc-
cur. Its scope has been combat when
combat was the major occupation of
men. As the necessity of social ad-
justment operated over the lust of
conquest the long story reflected and
illustrated the process of such adjust-
ment. When complete stratification
had taken place in European society,
the story-telling emphasis shifted to
the set of circumstances by which the
hero was introduced into the social
strata in which he was henceforth to
function. Thus, where the Greek long
story was content to deal with the ad-
venture of arms, the medieval ro-
ll

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

mance made a feat of arms the means,
subordinate to the event, of the hero's
admission into high society, slaying
the enemy as a prelude to manning
the king's daughter and sharing the
kingdom.

When, however, the goal of man's
serious endeavor became, as it did in
the last century, some sort of success-
ful escape froin social certitude, the
scope of the novel was extended to in-
clude the whole ground of his struggle
and its various objectives. Then came
America and brought a state of things
in which uncertainty multiplied as to
what the objective of man's secret and
incessant search should be. Except in
a limited, personal sense we have
never known in the United States just
which of us is villain and which hero.
In addition to the decay of recognized
social categories, our novelists find
themselves under the necessity of
working out their story patterns on a
set of shifting backgrounds no two of
which are entirely conformable. I
12

THE AMERICAN FORM

myself, and I suspect my experience
to be typical, have had to learn three
backgrounds, as distinct, except for
the language spoken, as Paris, Gopher
Prairie and the Scottish Highlands.
While I do not complain to the gods
of these things, I maintain that it gives
me a disadvantage compared to Mr.
Galsworthy, say, who, however rotten
he finds the warp of English society
to be, still finds it regularly spaced
and competent to sustain the design of
any story he may elect to weave.

There can be, of course, as many
arrangements of the items of indi-
vidual experience as there are ways
in which experience can widely hap-
pen. But these are not so many as
might be supposed. Varieties of per-
sonal adventure are more or less
pulled together by the social frame in
which they occur. One of the recog-
nized criterions of veracity in a novel
is the question, could, or couldn't, the
main incident have occurred in that
fashion in a given type of society. But
13

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

such a question can only be asked by
people who have acquired the ca-
pacity to feel truth in respect to their
own environment. It can never be
asked by people for whom apprecia-
tions of social pattern, as it affects the
literary expression of experience,
have been stereotj''ped to the warp of
relationships which are no longer ad-
mitted as social determinants. To
readers whose souls are only at home
in states of feudal dominance or de-
pendence there is no truth whatever
in modern realism.

The novel, more than any other
written thing, is an attempt to per-
suade, at its best to compel, men to
give over for a moment the pursuit of
the distant goal, and savor the color,
the intensity and solidarity of experi-
ence while it is passing. It is of no
particular moment which one of the
currents of experience that loop and
whirl and cascade and backwater
through the stream of human exist-
ence, is selected. It is important,
14

THE AMERICAN FORM

however, that it be presented in the
idiom, that is to say, in the Hfe pat-
tern, of the audience for whom it is in-
tended.

For every novel that the reviewer
elects for critical attention, he dis-
cards a dozen others of possibly equal
workmanship, for no reason but that
they deal with patterns that have
ceased to have — or perhaps never did
have — constructive relation to the so-
ciety in which we live. Or, in cases
where high veracity and perfection of
form compel his admiration, as in The
Age of Innocence, he makes his point
out of the very failure of validity in
the background, itself a fragment of
an earlier, outworn social fabric. Be-
low the limit of a possible claim on his
attention, every reviewer is also aware
of scores of novels, eyeless and amor-
phic, kept moving on the submerged
social levels by the thousands of read-
ers who never come any nearer the
surface of the present than perhaps to
be occasionally chilled by it.
15

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

Aside from questions of form, is not
the difference between novels which
compel our attention and those we
lightly discard, just this validity of re-
lation between social warp and indi-
vidual pattern? What I mean by
pattern is the arrangement of story
elements in true relations to the social
structure by which they are displayed.

It is not necessary that the support-
ing structure of society appear as sub-
ject matter, but a certain clear sense
of it in the writer's mind.

It is hardly possible yet in America
to produce so smooth an over-woven
piece as Mr. Waddingtoii of Wyck,
with the technique of one of those de-
tached motifs of Chinese embroidery,
in which, though everywhere to be
traced, not one thread of the sustain-
ing fabric is visible. Miss Sinclair
works under the conviction that the
social structure ought never to be
treated by the novelist as part of his
undertaking, but that, I suspect, is due
to her never having worked on the
16

THE AMERICAN FORM

disconcertingly spaced and frequently
sleazy background of American soci-
ety. What we have to look for here is
the ability, on the part of the writer, to
fix upon the prophetic trend of hap-
penings. Such a novel as Main Street
should sustain itself a long time as a
record of our discovery of the Com-
munity as villain, or, if you feel as
some of us do toward its leading lady,
as hero.

It is this necessity, forced upon us
by recent social developments, of
finding new, because as yet unde-
clared, points of balance in the ar-
rangements of the American elements
of story design, that has given rise to
the notion that in America the novel
need not concern itself with form pri-
marily. But this can hardly be the
case if we are to think of novel writ-
ing as an art, subject to the condition
of survival in time.

Form is the shape a story acquires
in its passage from the mind of the
author to his audience. That all
17

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

minds are much alike gives to all fic-
tion a recognized quality of form
which differentiates what goes by the
name of literature from mere reading
matter. The minds of any audience
living under fairly homogeneous in-
fluence acquire a characteristic recep-
tivity, a peculiarly native manner of
turning and tasting their experience
before assimilating it, which is bound
to be reflected in the shape of the ve-
hicle in which experience is recorded
and passed about. The American
short story form developed out of our
national method of attack on the im-
mediate issue with attention undi-
vided by any concern for the sequence
of events. It was, in fact, the lack of
sequence in our experience which
made the short story for a long time
our most expressive literary vehicle.
In this sense form in connection
with novel writing becomes a matter
of the span of perceptive conscious-
ness of the selected audience. This
gives, in our inchoate American life,
18

THE AMERICAN FORM

the greatest latitude of incident, but
confines the novelist rather strictly to
a democratic structure. It deprives
him of fixed goals of social or finan-
cial or political achievement as ter-
minal points, since none of these
things has any permanence in the
American scheme of things. The ut-
most the American novelist can hope
for, if he hopes at all to see his work
included in the literature of his time,
is that it may eventually be found to
lie along in the direction of the grow-
ing tip of collective consciousness.

Preeminently the novelist's gift is
that of access to the collective mind.
But there is a curious secret relation
between the novelist's point of access
and his grasp of form — and by form I
mean all that is usually included in
style, plus whatever has to do with the
sense of something transacting be-
tween the book and its reader. Who-
ever lays hold on the collective mind
at the node from which issues the
green bough of constructive change,
19

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

finds himself impelled toward what is
later discovered to be the prophetic
form. What, after all, is the slow
growth of appreciation of a novelist of
the first rank, but the simultaneous
widening of our social consciousness
to a sense of its own direction?

American novelists are often ac-
cused of a failure of form. But is this
anything more than an admission of
failure of access on the part of the
critics? Characteristic art form is sel-
dom perfected until the culture of
which it is an expression comes to
rest. Of all the factors influencing the
American novel form, I should expect
the necessity, inherent in a democratic
society, of conforming more directly,
at any given moment, to the state of
the collective consciousness rather
than to its direction, to be the deter-
mining item. This is what, generally
speaking, conditions the indispensable
quality of access. Under the demo-
cratic condition it can be achieved
only by participation. There is no
20

THE AMERICAN FORM

place in the American consciousness
for the superior being standing about
with his hands in his pockets, "pass-
ing remarks."

The democratic noveHst must be in-
side his novel rather than outside in
the Victorian fashion of Thackeray
or the reforming fashion of Mr. Wells.
He may, like Mr. Sherwood Anderson,
be so completely inside as to be un-
clear in his conclusion about the goal,
but there he is, Americanly, on his
way. The reference of personal con-
duct to an overhead Judgment which
forced the earlier novelist to assume
the god in the disposition of his char-
acters, has here given place to a true
democratic desire of man to see him-
self as he is seen by the people with
whom he does business. His search is
not so much for judgment as for reve-
lation, quick, nervous appreciations
of place, relationship and solidarity.
But in every case the validity of the
American form will rest upon that in-
tuitive access to the collective con-
21

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

sciousness, which it is the dream, and
probably the mission of democracy to
achieve.

A NOTE ON ALCOVES

by
James Branch Cabell

Ill

A NOTE ON ALCOVES

It is surprising what protean gifts a
theme develops once you attempt to
grapple with it. When I was asked to
set down on paper my personal no-
tions as to The Form and Scope of the
Novel, the affair seemed simple. But,
with the task actually begun, the type-
writer bell may hardly tinkle thrice
before one sees that the guide to fur-
ther composition must be the once
celebrated chapter, in I forget whose
Natural History, upon the snakes of
Iceland. It read, as you recall, "There
are no snakes in Iceland." For one
perceives that the form and scope of
the novel, if not similarly non-ex-
istent, at least stay indeterminable in
lands wherein the form and the scope
of prose fiction stay limitless.

The sole aim of the written, printed
and formally labeled novel is, I take
25

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

it, to divert. Such is (one may assume
with in any event quite reputable
backing) the only aim of creative
writing, and of all the arts. But much
the same sort of diversion seems to be
the purpose of a staggering number of
human endeavors : and it is when one
considers the novels which are not
formally labeled, that the theme eva-
sively assumes all manner of shapes,
and the field of prose fiction is re-
vealed as limitless.

I do not hunt paradox. I but wish
in real sincerity to acknowledge that
our trade of novel writing and pub-
lishing is an ineffably minor evince-
ment of the vast and pride-evoking
truth, that human beings are wiser
than reason. Pure reason — I mean,
as pure as human reason assays — re-
veals out of hand that the main course
of daily living is part boredom, part
active discomfort and fret, and, for
the not inconsiderable rest, a blunder-
ing adherence to some standard de-
rived from this or that hearsay. But
26

A NOTE ON ALCOVES

human beings, in this one abnegation
infinitely wise, liere all discard the
use of their reasoning powers, which
are perhaps felt here to be at least as
gullible as usual: and brave men
cheerily deny their immersion in the
futile muddle through which they toil
lip-deep. Pinned to the wall, the
more truthful of flesh and blood may
grant that this current afternoon does,
by the merest coincidence, prove an-
swerable to some such morbid and
over-colored description by people
bent on being "queer": but in the ad-
mitter's mind forgetfulness is already
about its charitable censorship of the
events of the morning, to the intent
that this amended account be placed
on file with many expurgated editions
of yesterday and the most brilliant
romances about tomorrow. For hu-
man memory and human optimism
are adepts at the prevarications which
everybody grasps, retails and tire-
lessly reiterates; these two it is who
coin the fictions which every person
27

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

weaves into the interminable extrava-
ganza that he recites to himself as an
accurate summing up of his own past
and future; and everywhere about
this earth's revolving surface moves a
circulating library of unwritten
novels bound in flesh and haber-
dashery.

Now the wholesome effect of these
novels is patent. It is thanks to this
brace of indefatigable romancers that
nobody really needs to notice how the
most of us, in unimportant fact, ap-
proach toward death through gray
and monotonous corridors. Besides,
one finds a number of colorful alcoves
here and there, to be opened by in-
toxication or vcnery, by surrender to
the invigorating lunacy of herd action,
or even by mental concentration upon
new dance-steps and the problems of
auction bridge. One blunders, indeed,
into a rather handsome number of
such alcoves which, when entered,
temporarily shut out the rigidity and
the only exit of the inescapable cor-
28

A NOTE ON ALCOVES

ridor. And in addition, as we go, all
sorts of merry tales are being inter-
changed about what lies beyond the
nearing door and the undertaker's lit-
tle black bag.

These are not, though, the only
anesthetics. The human maker of
fiction furnishes yet other alcoves,
whether with beautiful or shocking
ideas, with many fancy-clutching toys
that may divert the traveler's inind
from dwelling on the tedium of his
journey and the ambiguity of its end.
I have not yet, of course, come to con-
sideration of the formally labeled
novel, for this much is true of every
form of man-made fiction, whether it
be concocted by poets or statesmen,
by bishops in conclave or by adver-
tisers in the back of magazines. And
since memory and optimism, as has
been said, are the archetypal Homer
and St. John, the supreme and most
altruistic of all deceivers, the omnipo-
tent and undying masters of omni-
present fictive creation, their "meth-
29

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

ods" are in the main pursued by the
great pair's epigoni; who Hkcwise
tend to deal with the large deeds of
superhuman persons seen through a
glow of amber lucency, not wholly un-
akin to that of maple syrup.

Of the romances which make for
business prosperity and religious re-
vivals and wars to end war forever,
here is no call to speak. Nor need I
here point out that well-nigh every
one who anywhere writes prose today,
whether it takes tlie form of a tax re-
turn, or a magazine story, or a letter
beginning "My dear So-and-So," is
consciously composing fiction: and in
the spoken prose of schoolrooms and
courts of law and social converse, I
think, no candid person will deny that
expediency and invention collaborate.
It may be true that lies have short
legs, but civilization advances upon
them.

So do we all exist, as if in a warm
grateful bath, submerged and soothed
by fiction. In contrast to the inhabi-
30

A NOTE ON ALCOVES

tants of the Scilly Islands, who are re-
puted to have hved by taking in one
another's washing, so do we hve by
interchanging tales that will not wash.
There seems to be no bound, no fron-
tier trading-post, appointed anywhere
to this barter of current fiction, not in
the future nor in the years behind.
Men have been, almost cynically,
shown with what ease the romance
which we call history may be recast
throughout, now that America re-
joices in a past which has all been
painstakingly rewritten with more
care of the King's English, and where-
in the War of the Revolution takes its
proper place as the latest addition to
the list of German outrages. Our
newspapers continue the war-time
economizing of intelligence, and still
serve patriotic substitutes in serials,
wherein Red and Yellow and Black
perils keep colorful the outlook, and
fiends oppose broad-minded seraphim
in every political matter, and Messrs.
Lenine and Trotsky emulate the
31

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

apostle by dying daily. Our clergy
are no less prolific in their more fu-
turistic school of art, and on every
Sabbath morning discourse engagingly
of paradise and of that millennium of
which the advent is somehow being
brought nearer, one gathers, by the
more energetic of our prelates taking
notes and whisky in the larger res-
taurants. The past, the present and
the future are thus everywhere pre-
sented in the terms of generally pleas-
ure-giving prose fictions: and life is
rendered passable by our believing in
those which are most to our especial
liking.

Well, it is the task of the novelist — I
mean, at last, the novelist who is
frankly listed as such in Who's Who
— to aid according to his abilities in
this old world-wide effort, so to de-
lude mankind that nobody from birth
to death need ever really bother about
his, upon the whole, unpromising sit-
uation in the flesh. It is the sole aim
of the novelist, alike in art and com-
32

A NOTE ON ALCOVES

merce, to divert us from unprofitable
and rational worrying, to head yet
one more desperate sally from that
ordered living and the selves of which
we are tired.

So I suspect there must always be,
to the last digit, precisely as many
"methods" as there are novelists. For
the business of the novelist is to tell
untruths that will be diverting : and of
their divertingness he can have no
touchstone, before the receipt of roy-
alty statements, save only the re-
sponse which these untruths evoke
from him. His primary endeavor
must, for this reason, be to divert, not
any possible reader, but himself.

Some tale-tellers find themselves
most readily bedrugged by yearning
toward loveliness unknown and unat-
tainable: these are, we say, our ro-
manticists. To them are, technically,
opposed the Pollyannas among fiction
writers, who can derive a sort of ob-
scure esthetic comfort from consid-
ering persons even less pleasantly sit-
33

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

uated than themselves — somewhat as
a cabin passenger on a sinking ship
might consider the poor devils in the
steerage — and so write "realism." But
the inspiring principle remains un-
changed: you think of that which is
above or below you in order to avoid
thinking of what is about you. So it
really does not greatly matter whether
you travel with Marco Polo to Cathay
or with the Kennicotts to Gopher
Prairie. The excursion may be for the
purpose of looking at beautiful things
wistfully or at ugly things contemptu-
ously : the point is that it is an excur-
sion from the place where you regard
over-familiar things with a yawn.

When one considers these truisms —
and fails to see why anybody not in
the act of writing for the more suc-
cessful periodicals need dispute them
— the form and scope of even the for-
mally labeled novel seem fluctuating
and indeterminable. The novelist, it
is apparent, will write in the form —
with such dramatic, epic or lyric lean-
34

A NOTE ON ALCOVES

ings as his taste dictates — which he
personally finds alluring: his rhythms
will be such as caress his personal
pair of ears : and the scope of his writ-
ing will be settled solely by what he
personally does or does not find inter-
esting. For the serious prose crafts-
man will write primarily to divert
himself — with a part thrifty but in the
main a philanthropic underthought of
handing on, at a fair price, the play-
things and the games which he con-
trives, for the diversion of those with
a like taste in anodynes. And to do
this will content him. For he will be-
lieve that he may win to fame by
brewing oblivion, he will hope to in-
vent, if he be very lucky, some quite
new form of "let's pretend." But he
will not believe that anybody with a
valid claim to be considered a post-
graduate child can gravely talk about
affixing limits to the form and scope
of that especial pastime.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LIFE
AND FICTION

Floyd Dell

IV

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LIFE
AND FICTION

It seems to me that fiction, in what-
ever stage of development, still re-
tains the purpose of the fairy-tale.
But the fairy-tale, contrary to what
many people suppose, has a very seri-
ous purpose. We come into the world
equipped with a capacity of varied
emotional response to our environ-
ment. That environment, even in its
simplest terms, the home and family,
presents itself to our childish intelli-
gence as a mysterious chaos of facts;
and the greater world outside this lit-
tle world seems, as we come in contact
with it, more chaotic and mysterious
still. In the task of growing up, it is
necessary for our emotional responses
to this chaotic world to be coor-
dinated; we must deal with this huge
world quite as if we understood what
39

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

it was really like. So that from the:
first a process of education goes on
which undertakes to tell us — not so
much what the world is really like, for
that would only be to make confusion
worse confounded — but a notion of it
which will arrange our impulses to-
ward it into some kind of order.
"What is required — for we have as
children a wealth of emotions and lit-
tle experience — is an emotionally in-
telligible interpretation of the world.
The most preposterous fairy-tale, if it
is a good faii'j'^-tale — if it is in any
sense a work of art, and arranges
the emotions with which it so fan-
tastically deals into some kind of
rhj^thmic pattern — tells us more about
friendship, love, ambition, folly and
heroism, and their significance to our-
selves,— than we knew before. So
that it is, essentially, a kind of simple
pragmatic truth that is aimed at in the
fairy-talc. We can not learn life by
living it — we must have some kind of
notion about it to enable us to digest
40

LIFE AND FICTION

our experiences as we get them. And
of all kinds of teachings, that which
comes to us through our emotional
perceptions is the most fundamental,
precisely because it is the most
effective.

But the pragmatic truth of these
simple works of art is different from
plain factual truth, and in a sense an
opposite of it, in so far as factual truth
remains, for all our efforts to under-
stand and arrange it, chaotic. Under-
neath all the picturesque disorder of
the fairy-tale, there are the outlines of
a very simple and orderly world.

And the same, I think, is true of the
adult novel. Our experience has by
this time been enlarged, so that we de-
light in a picture of life, let us say, in
terms of jobs, wages, politics, and
erotic misadventures, rather than in
one in terms of quests, treasures, talk-
ing bushes and dragons. But under-
neath these recognizable incidents of
our chaotic daily lives there must be
the outlines of a simple and orderly
41

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

world — a world more simple and or-
derly than the unfathomable nature
of life's mj^steries — but emotionally
we require the satisfaction which only
simple certainties can bring. For we
still, as adults, read novels for the
same unconscious and serious pur-
pose with which we read fairy-tales as
children. We want to know more
about our relation to the world. But
we emphatically do not want the raw
material of life; we want life made
emotionally intelligible — and that can
only be effected by a process of sim-
plification and arrangement which a
hostile observer, indifferent to these
purposes, might call suppression, or
censorship, or lying.

Even so, the fable serves the pur-
pose which the mere facts fail to serve.
I have read in my life only one book
which was, in my opinion, measurably
true to the more common facts which
constitute ordinary life. That book —
and I recommend it to the curious
reader as a perfect illustration of the
42

LIFE AND FICTION

difference between artistic truth and
truth to facts — is One Man, by Robert
Steele. Since I have inentioned it, I
suppose I sliould add that its truth to
the facts of ordinary life does not con-
sist in the specific nature of the
crimes, misdemeanors and follies
there related — but rather in the irrele-
vance to each other of the emotional
states which it records. There are in
this book episodes — dozens of them —
which would have served Dostoievsky
for a climax. But, as here presented,
they have no emotional validity what-
ever, because they have no relation to
what comes before and after. Judged
as a work of art, the book is prepos-
terous and trivial. Its sole signifi-
cance is as a document showing what
human life, before it has been sub-
jected to the processes of art, is like.
Ordinary people are not so "bad" as
the hero of this book; but they are, I
think, quite as absurd and contradic-
tory. The true-to-facts story of any
one I know would make a document
43

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

equally inchoate and meaningless
with this, if perhaps a little less sensa-
tional. And it is because human life
in the raw is like this, that human be-
ings need and desire those simplifi-
cations, those interpretations, which
by suppressing, altering, rearranging
the facts, permit what is left to have
some emotional meaning.

No one, I think, who has any very
acute sense of the variety and
jumbled irrelevance of the facts of
life as they present themselves to us
in ordinary human experience would
either imagine that the literal record
of these facts constituted a story, or be
so ambitious as to attempt to frame
them all into an intelligible emotional
sequence. Yet this — cither or both — is
what the writers of "realistic" fiction
are currently and disapprovingly said
to be doing by many American critics.
There is supposed to be a "school" of
writers whose theory of fiction is to
put down everything "just as it hap-
pens in real life." There are gloomy
44

LIFE AND FICTION

forebodings of the death of the art of
fiction under the assaults of the "lit-
eral chroniclers of life." These fears
are quite unnecessary, and the lovers
of romance can take heart. Not
Theodore Dreiser in his inost zealous
realistic mood ever undertook to set
down more than the limited and par-
ticular selection of facts which he
deemed necessary to convey the qual-
ity of his emotion.

There is, I think, no quarrel be-
tween romance and realism. The se-
lection of facts is more rigorous and
more conventional in romantic fic-
tion, more generous and more adven-
turous in realistic fiction. I can not
even assert, as a writer of fiction that
has been very flatteringly called real-
istic, that realism aims more ardently
than romance at truth. It does seem
to me to have the merit, whatever that
may count for, of being more inti-
mately recognizable as a vehicle of
truth by those whose experiences af-
ford them the opportunity of testing
45

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

in their own minds the literalness of
the accounts by which that truth is
sought to be conveyed. The literal
truthfulness of Sinclair Lewis's ac-
count of a day-coach in the Middle
West may not imply an imaginative
insight into the souls of its passengers;
but there is no doubt that it puts many
of us into a receptive frame of mind
toward emotional conclusions about
middle-western souls which we might
otherwise be disposed to reject as too
painful. The function of literalness
in factual detail would seem, in fic-
tion, to be much the same as it is in
the court-room — to make it harder to
escape the obligation of feeling "un-
pleasant" emotions. The author's
motive is plain : he has these emotions,
and he wishes to lessen the burden of
them by sharing them with others.
And the reason wliy realism is so often
of tliis "unpleasant" character, is sim-
ply that happy emotions need no such
elaborate reinforcement. We do not
need to have it proved that the liero
46

LIFE AND FICTION

and heroine lived happily ever after;
the assertion suffices. It is when they
did not live happily ever after that
many painful — and intimately recog-
nizable— details are needed to per-
suade us to believe that so it hap-
pened. But if we read these realistic
accounts of our human misadven-
tures, it is not because the manner of
the telling has a virtue of its own, but
because we desire to enlarge our con-
ception of our lives so as to bring
these difficult and painful facts also
to some emotionally intelligible rela-
tionship with the rest of our experi-
ence.

And if any of the new kinds of sci-
entific knowledge, such for example
as psycho-analysis, are to be of use to
the novelist, it must be, I think, not by
virtue of any magic of "truth" which
they contain, and certainly not by
bringing new facts within the scope of
the novelist's interest, but rather be-
cause they may possibly simplify his
task of selection and arrangement — •
47

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

because they give him certain concep-
tions of life as emotionally intelligible
and possibly as fundamentally ap-
pealing as the oldest fairy-tale.

THE MAJOR ISSUE

by
Waldo Frank

THE MAJOR ISSUE

To the incidental character of the
novel as a reflection of life we give
great care; to its essential nature as a
contribution to life v^e bring ignorance
and neglect.

How would we regard the critic
who judged El Greco, Rembrandt, the
African woodcarver by their conform-
ance with a set of rules of anatomy
and geometry text-books? Would we
not say: the artist who creates by
means of physical forms needs knowl-
edge of physical laws, knowledge of
physical structure. For it is of these
materials that he articulates his vision
and his form. But he is an artist inso-
far as he has a vision and a form. His
knowledge of muscles, torsos, limbs,
of spatial quantities is his knowledge
of means. If we wish to know en-
51

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

dogenously about muscles, torsos,
limbs, we do not go to the artist . . .
although we may go to men who have
learned vastly from artists. And if we
wish to understand intelligently the
particular use which the particular
artist makes of such matters, we must
learn first what the artist wants to say
and determine by that measure if he
has used them well.

The novelist's need of individual
and social psychologj^ is a pretty good
analogue to the plastic artist's need of
physical forms; the novelist's use of
customs, manners, institutions, creeds,
is kin to the plastic artist's use of the
ways of mass and space. How comes
it then that we think we have struck
to the heart of the nature and reason
of a novel when we discuss its psycho-
logical correctness, (its verisimilitude
with our own idea of certain men and
women) or its awareness of certain
social problems?

Of course, there is reason for this,
but it is not as some of us doubtless
would be pleased to have it, that this
52

THE MAJOR ISSUE

is a "scientific age." "Even in our fic-
tion," to quote the imaginary profes-
sor, "we look for serious discussion of
fact and of truth." To whom I make
reply: "In your fiction, you look for
corroborating statements of your own
particular brands of fact and truth — ■
brands put up from previous creative
contributions: which is quite another
matter." It is not scientific nor con-
ducive to the advantage of science, to
judge a novel in terms let us say of its
"psychological accuracy" or of its
"faithful reflection of social reality."
For to do this is to accept as an Abso-
lute Measure of accuracy and faithful-
ness the rationalized data of previous
creators or groups of creators; and
thereby to hinder the continuity of
man's contribution to reality of ex-
perience which is, from the scientific
standpoint, part of the function of cre-
ative art. Here as elsewhere the gap
between science and art is truly the
gap between false science and bad art.
To be scientific about art is to be es-
thetic about it.

52

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

Nor is it necessary to go back to
Aristotle. Enough, as regards that
very great man's Esthetic, to say that
his meaning in the phrase "Imitation
of nature" was determined by a posi-
tive and common animistic under-
standing of nature which included
primarily the dynamic principle of
the individual will and which most of
us moderns lack : and that it was lim-
ited by an ignorance of the processes
of the human Psyche which was ex-
cusable in Aristotle but is less excus-
able in Mr. Babbitt. . . .

Let us skip to the nineteenth cen-
tury. German Romanticism and
French Romanticism, by respective
metaphysical and esthetic methods,
brought new sentient worlds to the use
of the evolving will of Europe. The
hierarchic stuffs so satisfactory to
Shakespeare, Montaigne, Racine, no
longer served the creator. So Roman-
ticism ordered Receptivity to Material.
All fields, all worlds, all "realities" . . .
from the innermost ego to the farther-
54

THE MAJOR ISSUE

most sea . . . became the stuff of ex-
pression. Despite the complexity of
this and the intricate relation of the
artist and the group, one can say di-
rectly enough that to the novelist this
meant a simple thing : here once more
was adequate material whereby he
could express himself. The creator
was as ever active and dynamic. The
material, at least in the ultimate pro-
cess toward art, was fuel, symbol,
means — anything but end. Now, after
the creative act, came the Program.
Balzac assured us that he was Secre-
tary to Society. Flaubert vowed that
from his works the least personal
taint had been excised. Zola and the
Goncourt brothers discoursed on Dar-
win whom they never understood and
framed the Naturalist novel which
they never wrote. For Balzac was the
opposite of social secretary: he was
the creator of dense organic forms to
the making of which he kneaded the
"life" of France as the baker kneads
flour. Flaubert, as weak an analyst
55

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

as ever gained fame for being a great
one, was a pure and powerful intuitif :
he was a true progenitor of imagism
and of cubism : he made of Emma Bo-
vary, Salammbo, Saint Anthony and
Frederic Moreau successive cxpres-
sionistic forms of his own uncomfort-
able state in France. Only the disciples
of Zola, whose names we forget,
wrote Naturalist novels according
to the program. And the trouble with
them lay not with a program good or
bad: it lay with their own lack of cre-
ative power.

Now, during the propaganda pe-
riods of Romanticism, when receptiv-
ity to fresh material was a point to be
fought for, the terms realist and
naturalist as indicating acceptance of
the romantic attitude had meaning.
The fresh material of the romanticist
became the reality of the realist. The
realists, later the naturalists, were
they who espoused and practised the
romanticist esthetic. Correctly, there-
fore, realist and romanticist were
56

THE MAJOR ISSUE

one: and during the romanticist pe-
riod alone did the word reahsm, ap-
plied to the novel, have sense as a de-
fining term. Moreover, in those rare
cases where the romanticist will for
new-worlds-to-conquer begot the fi-
nality of a new-conquered-world (a
true work of art), the romanticist-
realist ended in classicism. His work
was classic. The whole lot of oppo-
nent terms equated into zero.

Never are these terms with their
old connotations heard today in
France and Germany where they were
born. They are still with us, where
they are merely borrowed. Outside
of this technical and relative meaning
about which most of us are as igno-
rant as we are of the esthetic school of
Egypt, realism as referred to art and
the novel is as senseless a term as has
ever been picked up from a junkshop.
Every artist that has lived in the
world is a realist insofar as himself is
real and as his material, determined
by himself and the world, must be real
57

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

also. But no artist conceivable to
man can be a realist in the sense of
our critical implication — the sense of
an absolute reality which true scien-
tists would not arrogate to mathe-
matics and certainly not to man. "It
is the highest glory of man," said
Remy de Gourmont, "that there is no
science of man." Our standard of
reality is an accumulating, gyrating
and disappearing flux of subjective
contributions. If there is a science of
man, its name is esthetics, and its
axiom: that each new contribution
shall be gauged by the inner law of its
own genesis. And here is an axiom
that does away with ninety-nine one-
hundredths of our "intelligent com-
ment" on novels that create char-
acters and discuss conditions "true to
life."

What happens to us is simple. Re-
ceptivity to material was a means for
the creation of the nineteenth century
Epic — an Epic which I am convinced
is still in the pre-Homeric stage. That
58

THE MAJOR ISSUE

receptivity we have made into an End.
The Continental Europeans are inde-
fatigable program-makers. They
made a program of the liberating pro-
cess of the nineteenth century novel.
We use that program like pedantic
children to measure our own works
and give them meaning: with the re-
sult that we rob them of what mean-
ing they have. Meantime in Europe,
they have twentieth century novels — ■
and twentieth century programs
whereby to gauge them.

Program-making is a vital part of
the process whereby the social body
more or less assimilates those new ex-
periences and forms of life which are
literature and art. But program-mak-
ing must start from a recognition of
the extra-intellectual nature of crea-
tion. The intellect does not create, it
measures and brings up what it appre-
hends. The value of imaginative liter-
ature, even pragmatically as nourish-
ment to life, lies in the fact that it
creates what the intellect — theory,
59

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

program, a priori standards of good,
bad, right and wrong — does not as yet
possess. For the intellect possesses
what was created before. Hence con-
temporary art can never fall within the
scope of pre-existing programs. And
to judge the novel — its value as a con-
tribution to literature and life — on the
basis of any given psychological or
documentary measure of fact, truth,
reality and the like, is irrelevant and
absurd.

This formulated problem of scope
and theory concerns the novelist only
indirectly; only insofar as he is af-
fected by the critic who, rationalizing
his work on the basis of the work it-
self or on the basis of some forebear's
work, either aids or clogs the process
of assimilating the novelist's contribu-
tion to the sum of social experience.
Let the novelist think that he is pri-
marily concerned with socialism,
housing problems, psycho-analysis
and the like. If he is an artist, his
thinking will be but a detail of his
60

THE MAJOR ISSUE

work; and if he is not an artist his
work will be but a negligible detail of
his thinking. "From the beginning to
the end," wrote Cervantes, "Don Qui-
xote is an attack on the romances of
chivalry." With this mouse of a pro-
gram he produced his mountain of an
epic, because he was a mountain — a
veritable sea and mountain — of a
man. The esthetic value of any
novel is the end-product of its related
elements of life. The novelist who
deals with, and relates into organic
form, elements of life, with whatever
intellectual conviction, may create
Beauty if he has that virtue in him.
But the novelist who tries to deal di-
rectly with Beauty, get at it directly,
short-cutting the elements of life, is
doomed. The artist in the act of crea-
tion can afford to be anything rather
than an esthete.

But the critic and the public — let

them look to their ways! Let them

cease from studying a means as the

end. Let them cease from parroting

61

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

decayed programs. Let them not
think that they have dealt with a novel
. . . however much they praise it . . .
when they have discussed its "psy-
chology" and its "documentarj'^ mate-
rial." (The term "psychological novel'*
has less meaning than the term "phys-
iological oil-painting.")

We have a few true creators, cap-
turers of organic form — which is an-
other term for life — from the hinter-
lands at which mankind rekindles its
fires and forges its tomorrows. And
w^e have the perennial Mass — passive,
indolent, like a woman fond of reflec-
tions, hostile to all contributions, since
they mean renewal, effort, change.
Which will the American critic serve :
the dross of the Mass which is the
Mass itself, or the spirit of the Mass
which is the artist?

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW
Zona Gale

yi

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

Already we have mosaics of beauty
in the American novel. But it lacks
organic beauty.

In the modern novels of England
the high example of organic beauty
seems to be the work of Hudson. No
one knows what he does; but his touch
unseals an essence.

In the American novel we have
nothing approaching this essence.
One is grateful, in these days of the
triumphant discovery of the common-
place, for mere beautiful mosaics.
But these have little to do with the
basic beauty, the organic beauty
which a novel must breathe before it
can approximate its potential scope
and function.

Now organic beauty in any art must
be compact of beauty not already
familiar to us. Familiar beauty can
65

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

give us the mosaics. But it is strange-
ness in beauty which alone can weave
the spell and bear the perfume. This
is not to say unreality; but on the con-
trary a deeper reality than we are ac-
customed to divine. The reality of lit-
eral levels of perception to which we
do not ordinarily penetrate or of
which, rather, we are not often con-
scious as they penetrate our own
plane. Professor Eucken's claim that
the spiritual world is "an independent
reality, waiting to be apprehended,
waiting to be incorporated into our
universe" is enormously served by art
whose functioning is so largely in ex-
tensions of the ordinaiy faculties.
Between the naturalistic novel, which
is a record, and the romantic novel,
which is the product of human imag-
ining, lies this other novel, the novel
of tomorrow, concerned with immi-
nent yet almost undivined reality of
human conduct, human dream, per-
ceived "for their own sakes, with the
eyes of disinterested love."
66

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

Our failure may lie in the fact that
such beauty as our novels have is
chiefly concerned with moral idealism
and romantic love, as we know them
now. Our moral idealism is still in-
tent on the esoteric with — shall we
say? — either simple standards w^hich
ought long ago to have been taken for
granted or conventionalized stand-
ards having no correspondence with
the mystery of conduct. Therefore
our novels devote themselves to, say,
one emerging from a crude upbring-
ing to the point of being hounded by
her "furies" to escape tawdriness. Or
even with those records of Henry
James, that — Conrad calls him — that
"historian of the individual con-
science, of adventure in which only
choice souls are involved" — crucial in-
stances, always suffused with a cer-
tain beauty, but always the beauty of
the individual conscience in known
areas. Moral beauty rather than eso-
teric beauty. And as for the treatment
in novels of romantic love, that is al-
67

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

ways a matter of bright feathers, of
the pas de seal before the cave door,
our only advance from that cave door
courting being that there are antiph-
onal feathers and dancing instead
of mascuHne antics alone. In spite of
the fact that there is, both in idealism
and in love, something not ourselves
which is the glory of the experience,
still the novel continues to treat only
of measurable reactions, rarely call-
ing down the utter sunlit areas where
every human soul docs sometime en-
ter. Now these sunlit areas are a part
of life, of reality. If they can be ex-
perienced, they can be incarnated in
the novel. And it is these sunlit
spaces of discernible reality which
alone can give to the novel a basis of
beauty.

Moreover these reaches are not
merely extensions of moral idealism
or of romantic love. Neither the one
nor the other may be of dominating
concern there, save in some form so
heightened that it has passed into
68

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

pure beauty. Nor are these areas re-
mote ; it is their power that they inter-
penetrate the homeliest lives and the
most ordinary surroundings. This is
a point which the worshipper of mo-
saics of beauty will not readily admit
and perhaps he is right about his mo-
saics. But organic beauty is every-
where at home.

The function of the novel is not to
treat of life as it appears to the ordi-
nary eye; or even to treat life in its
ordinary aspect if that were ascertain-
able. It is not even to treat of life as
it should be, if that were ascertain-
able. Its function is not primarily to
report the familiar at all. The func-
tion of the novel is to reflect the
familiar as permeated by the unfamil-
iar; to reflect the unknown in its daily
office of permeating the known.

Thus the novelist is to go not only
"joying in his visible universe" but in
that universe by which his own is in-
terpenetrated. That universe invis-
ible save as music or color or the word
69

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

or some other high manifestation
causes it to flower in human experi-
ence.

It is this high manifestation of the
word which Hudson makes. He
causes unfamihar verities to enter our
ken as verities. For the poetic mind,
the mind then of the noveHst at his
best, is the perceiver of the real curve
of life, the knower of something at
least of its inner ecstasy.

. . . How shall this interpretation
best be made? This accomplishment
concerns the form of the novel.

However extreme has been the
modern novel in stressing the com-
monplace, it has developed a form
suitable for the expression of reality.
Any reality, commonplace or not.
This form is direct, unrcflective, high-
ly selective. It is in immediate con-
tact with its material. It is uncom-
promising, tactless, unashamed. And
its style is as bare and clear as a plain.

It may be that the whole flair for
the commonplace will be found to
70

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

have contributed chiefly to the forma-
tion of a new purity of form. The
treatment of the commonplace calls
for stark precision and the novel has
learned something of stark precision
through treating the commonplace.
If the novel had continued to treat of
"the good, the true and the beautiful"
it might be, with the redundance of
that phrase itself, laboring on in a
fringed and silken fashion, tasseled,
plumed, melancholy.

When the novel can take that form
■ — that naked and lovely instrument — ■
and that stark style, and cause them
to function in the expression of name-
less beauty, such as Hudson summons,
it will have sounded the new note, the
note of the novel of tomorrow. And
this will be a note of romanticism, but
not of romanticism as we have ever
known it.

Ten years ago a wise man said:
Free verse is all well enough. It is
now a vehicle for many who otherwise
would have no vehicle. But wait until
the poets begin to use it. Then!
71

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

So it is of the terse, the staccato, the
compact, the shorn form and style of
the modern American novel. Height-
en its compactness, take from it cer-
tain affectations such as dclihcrate
sordidness, saturate it with all that
divination can capture of communi-
cable beauty. "Then!"

To use his divination to clarify the
interpenetrating beauty of common
life and to draw down still other
beauty; not to manufacture it from
unreality but to discern it in Reality
and to reflect it; and then to pour this
beauty through the clear crystal of a
form as honest as a milk bottle — there
lies the novelist's lovely, his impera-
tive task.

But this he will never do if he is
working with his mind alone. Only
when he knows that his divination of
beauty, of all life is "an independent
growth which he himself tends and
watches" will be incarnate in the
novel the vast and lovely proportion
of the days.

THE PROFESSION OF NOVELIST
by

VII
THE PROFESSION OF NOVELIST

In view of the many generalizations
now circulating about literature in the
United States, it might be interesting,
or even instructive, to examine the
specific case of a relatively young man
with a published novel of authentic
value. It is necessary, for this pur-
pose, to limit the investigation to a be-
ginning writer, in fact, to a first novel.
Its purpose will be to discover exactly
the conditions which here await a
fresh and actual literature.

It is, almost invariably, character-
istic of a novelist of value that he
should not, initially, be situated in a
material ease. Young men with
money, and post-graduate honors, do
not commonly turn to the novel, but
to criticism and poetry. Young men
who make their bow in the better
known magazines hardly ever write
75

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

novels — worth a thought at all. Those
who do, surprisingly, write good
books produce them in hours taken
from widely other necessary tasks; or
in times of sickness and forced idle-
ness. Such an individual, pouring
into his pages everything, elsewhere
suppressed, that he integrally is, fi-
nally has a manuscript put together
and typewritten with an infinite pains
and an immeasurable difficulty; it is
posted or carried to a publisher; and,
after a space of something like six
weeks, he has a — for him — stupen-
dous letter of acceptance.

This novel, which we are under-
standing as thoroughly worth doing,
will, of course, be different from the
flood of readily marketable fictions;
it will probably be tragic, or, at the
least, satirical, in spirit; and there is
a chance that the manner of its writ-
ing will, too, have aspects of original-
ity. The result of all this will be that
the publisher, almost tearful over his
unselfish nobility, will call the writ-
76

THE PROFESSION OF NOVELIST

er's attention to the fact that his book,
while it may accomplish a critical suc-
cess, can have little or no sale.

The inevitable deduction will be re-
flected in the rate of the royalty: the
most honest payment possible will be
five per cent, on the first two thousand
copies, with two and a half per cent,
more after that, and, perhaps, a future
increase to ten per cent. This novel,
submitted toward the end of Septem-
ber— novels are apt to be written
through the open months — will be ac-
cepted about November first. By that
time the publisher's spring list must
be pretty well in hand — with the pres-
ent manufacturing conditions a num-
ber of the spring books will be al-
ready, mechanically, under way — and
the novel we are considering set for
publication next fall.

It will, then, appear a year after it
was submitted; and, in the general
mode of the publishing business, a
royalty report will be returned three
months later. The report will be for-
77

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

warded in three months, and the half
yearly payment made in six. This
novel, then, let us say, was actually
begun late in the winter of nineteen
hundred and nineteen and, finished,
it was submitted — this is very rapid — ■
in the fall of that year. It was pub-
lished in the autumn of nineteen
twenty, and the first sum of money
obtained from it sometime in the April
or May of nineteen hundred and
twenty-one, or two years after the put-
ting of a pen to paper.

This novel, if it is individual and
vigorously fine — unless it happens to
be carried on the wave of a chance
popular cause — must be, as a material
property, a failure. If, for instance,
two thousand copies are sold, the pub-
lisher will about get his money back;
and, if its retail price is two dollars,
after two j^ears the writer will receive
two hundred dollars. If four thou-
sand are sold, the publisher, thinking
himself well out of it, will make a lit-
tle, and the writer will have the sum
of five hundred dollars.
78

THE PROFESSION OF NOVELIST

During that period, you see, while
he may, perhaps, write two other
novels, he can have none pubhshed.
A second will, if he is fortunate, be in
preparation for appearance not soon-
er than six months after the first came
out . . .that is the best he can hope
for.

Meanwhile, he is at the necessary
employment of finding a living for
himself and, perhaps, two or three
others. The temperament of a novel-
ist, his dream of peace, leads him
quickly to marriage. If he is able he
will, first, support himself by contri-
butions to magazines of generous pay-
ments. Superficially, that has an ap-
pearance of contributing to his main
desire, the writing of novels; but, in
reality, it is not only tragically far
from that but actually destructive to
his ability as a novelist. It would be
closer to his occupation if he labored
in the pit of a steel mill; for there, at
least, he would come in contact with
the material of his aim.

He might be, again, he often is, em-
79

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

ployed in writing for newspapers, on
special or general assignments, or
even in a moderate editorial capacity.
But that, while it is a better prepara-
tion for the novel than that offered by
the public taste in short stories, breaks
his power of concentration upon the
longer ventures. There is hardly a
novelist with a training in newspaper
offices whose style is not sharp and
brittle; it is, through habit, focussed
on incidentals rather than on the
whole. And of the other multitudi-
nous occupations by the means of
which beginning novelists manage to
keep themselves alive nothing in de-
tail need be said.

My own experience, attended by
some unusually fortunate circum-
stances, in the main followed this
course. The Lay Anthony — to refer
to it only in the terms of its reviews — •
was, as a first book, quite generously
noticed. I was to get a five per cent,
royalty after a preliminary thousand
copies were sold — then, in, I think,
80

THE PROFESSION OF NOVELIST

nineteen hundred and fourteen, a sale
of a thousand would repay the pub-
lisher— and . . . some nine hundred
were bought. I do not remember the
terms of the contract for Mountain
Blood, brought out a year afterward;
but I recall very sharply that it did not
pay me a penny then. I sold three
papers of a type I liked to a magazine
the reverse of popular, and got from
them, in a diminishing scale, fifteen,
twelve and a half and ten dollars.

That brought me well into nineteen
sixteen, but — where my novels were
concerned — nowhere near a material
solvency. The fortunate circum-
stances alluded to, in connection with
myself, were a comfortable place to
live, an unconquerable laxness in
whatever I failed to like or only half
liked, and George Horace ■ Lorimer.
But all that, necessaiy as an explana-
tory note to my comments, is a digres-
sion.

The point is that, in the United
States, the western world, of the pres-
81

THE NO^^L OF TOMORROW

ent, the profession of a novelist sim-
ply does not exist. The novel, dif-
ferent from the lyrical measures of
poetry or the compactness of essays
and critical papers, requires a long
time for its composition; it needs close
thought and reasoning, yes, and peace,
quiet; and such conditions, today, are
expensive. The good young novel is
the product of passion and resent-
ment and a bitterness at injustice —
qualities missed by the rich — or it is
made of a dream of loveliness desir-
able in its shining remoteness from
the immediate scene.

Things like those, beautiful and far
away, or close and tragic, people, the
public, do not like and will not pay
for. The spectacle of suffering, so
purifying to the individual, the mass
neither will nor can support. And —
but perhaps it is only my conviction-
fine novels can be constructed from
one of two sources, either they present
the heroic or cowardly individual op-
posed to hopeless odds and death; or
82

THE PROFESSION OF NOVELIST

they have to do with that which was
beautiful and is lost. There is, I feel,
nothing else worth an inattentive
curse.

The novel, itself a modern affair, is
a necessary victim of modern circum-
stances: men no longer have any lei-
sure, any quiet, any interruption of
the waste of their beings. Individuals,
individual minds, are disappearing in
the confusion following the humani-
tarian welter of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Any art is, in essence, aristo-
cratic, proud, free from the cheapness
of the mob; and now the mob, like a
turbid and dead sea, is over all the
land.

There is, in the scheme of the pres-
ent, no need, no general need, for
truthful or delicate novels. Those
that are, hopefully, produced, have a
short or a long life in a very limited
sphere. A number of fine novels,
when the truth or a delicacy of vision
is never for a sentence departed from,
will, after a succession of books and
83

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

years, undoubtedly afford a dignified,
but hardly plentiful, living. With
them, as well, a reputation for integ-
rity, for honesty and courage, will
grow and fix itself in men's minds;
and that is a gieat and a happy
accomplishment.

That, however, lies in the distant
future; the present is devastating; and
there isn't, in the United States, even
the small pension that fell to Mr. Con-
rad. What, specially, makes this con-
dition sad is the fact that its grimness
is accompanied by the most hearten-
ing proclamations and pretensions.
The whole American world, it is made
to appear, is waiting impatiently with
laurels and gold for distinguished na-
tive creative writers. It is a situation
that would be resembled by accom-
panying a dark secretive play with the
loud music of a Follies Review.

A cast clamor of hj'^pocrisy, of self-
laudation, has always resounded
about the arts of music and literature;
the titles of admirable novels are,
84

THE PROFESSION OF NOVELIST

seemingly, on all sentient lips; the
titles are, yes and even rude ideas of
the plans of writing; a few actual vol-
umes are prominent upon library
tables . . . but that is as far as it goes.
The novels themselves, like the de-
frauded relatives of prosperous and
comfortable families, are not wanted
around. It isn't pleasant for the snug-
ly-minded, where they are sensitive at
all, to be in the company of Sherwood
Anderson. There is really no reason
why they should have him unsettling
their luxurious somnolence; in such a
case I shouldn't put up with him for a
second. I'd dismiss The Triumph of
the Egg with a vague satisfactory re-
mark about the need to suppress these
propertyless agitators. Ship 'em to
Rooshia, I would advise. Or else I'd
make it clear that no such books could
have a place in my family.

That is unanswerable, it Is, and no

argument or effort can overthrow it.

However, I might wish for a better

world — and, luckily, it is not on my

85

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

sheet to struggle for improvements —
with the earth as it is I can not con-
scientiously blame its attitude toward
men who are, in essence, its bitterest
critics. To put down "love those that
revile you" is nothing more than a
vain display of ink.

Literature, as an art, as a service of
beauty, has little or no place in the
modern state of societ}^ and it is just
possible that it will never be of im-
portance again. Maybe, forever, it is
all over, only a lingering and cher-
ished memory of something fantastic
in the hearts of a dwindling few.
There is — to my mind, pessimistic in
cast — no evidence of even an infin-
itely delayed improvement in human-
ity; it is no more than the alternate
fading and glow of a charcoal fire, a
core of heat, blown on intermittently
by a bellows. When the leathers of
the bellows wear out, when the gases
of the charcoal are exhausted, there
will be a minute fleck, a dead drifting
atom, of ash.

86

THE PROFESSION OF NOVELIST

Yet, against all calamity — and I
have said this so often that I must
seem to be falling into the repetitious
habit of old age — only beauty, woven
in fragile materials or in hard metal
and stone, is more durable than time.
A fragmentary poem will be death-
less, an arrangement of the spirit in
prose will last, as our time runs, for-
ever; but that will keep no body, and
very little hope, warm.

THE NEW NOVEL

by
Robert Herrick

VIII
THE NEW NOVEL

What is the new novel to be? In
retrospect from another generation
this phenomenon may not seem, after
all, so different from its forerunners
as contemporary self-consciousness
would like us to believe. Time has a
leveling way with all human accom-
plishments, even those done in the
pure ether of art, and the surviving
landmarks often seem to have little
relation with the intervening valleys,
however noisily these were once in-
habited. The increasing preoccupa-
tion with the novel in our days and
its voluminous and multifarious pro-
duction may be due less to a renewed
or undiscovered vitality in the form
itself than to a growing realization of
its adaptability to the needs of a
crowded and self-conscious civiliza-
tion. For it is beyond dispute that the
91

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

novel has taken its place with the cin-
ema and the newspaper in the vast
cultural and interpretative effort of
our world. Tliat it is discovering
within its flexible form new possibil-
ities for the exploitation of new fields
promises little for its present or future
performance. It is the easiest and
simplest weapon of self-revelation for
a democratic society (however diffi-
cult and toilsome the complete mas-
tery of its art is) and in its deepest
essence must remain always autobio-
graphical, and hence universally
alluring.

During the late century the novel
oscillated outwardly between the rival
camps of Realism and Romance. The
long, inconclusive battle of the critics
which somewhat languidly animated
the intellectual life of the late nine-
teenth century was largely concerned
with the defence and the attack of
these two metaphysical unrealities, and
it was not until the century mark was
safely rounded that we began to real-
92

THE NEW NOVEL

ize that the prolonged battle about
realism and romance, like all vehe-
ment conflicts, had been waged in a
fog of misunderstanding for an im-
practical victory. Neither side of the
controversy had an exclusive posses-
sion of the truth, for neither ideal ex-
isted except in the partisan imagina-
tion of the theorist, and the sturdier
practitioners of the art dodged back
and forth between the embattled
camps — as they always have done and
always will do. For realism and ro-
mance represent, verbally, nothing
more than two persistent moods of hu-
manity, under which it surveys itself
and the universe intermittently, not
mutually exclusive, and together not
completely occupying the ample terri-
tory of the human spirit. Consistent
realism can be found only in the work
of inferior and unimaginative artists,
because they are more easily satisfied
with surfaces, and a world of surfaces
is the nearest approach to the absolute
in a subjective universe. Conversely
93

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

it may be said that consistent romance
easily becomes nonsense, and human
beings striving on the whole for the
use of their intelligence quickly sur-
feit with undiluted romance. That is
what happened exactly at the end of
the last century when, in this country
especially, a new and uneducated
reading public avid for simple imag-
inative excitement boosted the sales of
flimsy romantic novels to unheard of
figures, then overnight rejected its
passion.

With the snuffing out of this unsub-
stantial romance, the way was cleared
for better things (not that the cream-
puff "line" of romance has wholly dis-
appeared or ever will lack favor in a
world so largely composed of naive
people, but the flavors have been
changed, and the more earnest crafts-
men no longer supply the market for
this kind of goods). The younger and
more serious minded writers having
given over the concoction of saccha-
rine toys for the popular taste, ignor-
94

THE NEW NOVEL

ing the tiresome debates of the critics,
went out for fresh adventure, and
here it was that for nearly a genera-
tion England led the way. There be-
gan a period of interesting experi-
mentation, which pushed the novel
into untried fields and carried it for
good and all beyond that futile con-
troversy of realism and romance.
Novelists forgot their old preoccupa-
tions, as to what could and could not
be done in fiction, what the public
would and would not "stand for."
They have found that the scope of the
novel can be indefinitely stretched to
include new matters and new meth-
ods and that the reading public will
take — that is some part of it will take
— whatever gives promise of novelty
or a fresh perception of the old. Even
dullness! For the ancient truth that
the dull and the commonplace belong
properly to life and can even be en-
dured in literature when intelligently
presented has also been rediscovered.
Under the exhilarating leadersliip of
95

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

Mr. Wells the new English novel as-
sumed much of the kaleidoscopic vari-
ety of the newspaper and tried to
teach the reader to think, at least to
consider many hitherto unfamiliar
subjects. It also acquired, at many
hands, a new frankness about human
sexuality, or perhaps merely lost a
puritan reticence of expression on pri-
vate matters which had been tempo-
rarily imposed upon it by public man-
ners. Finally it began a search of the
Freudean caves for fresh motives and
new thrills. Incidentally it had ac-
quired from the glib interpretation
of those opulent years just before the
war, many of the European tricks of
craftsmanship that had heretofore
been concealed from the Anglo-Saxon
by the veil of a foreign language. In
short the novelist's art had become,
like morals, thoroughly eclectic and
individual, choosing its methods and
its materials where it found anything
to its purpose, often whimsically.
With this surprising wealth of plun-
96

THE NEW NOVEL

der both in matter and form, it re-
mains to be said in all honesty that
this period had no great master of the
prose epic, — no Tolstoy, no Zola, no
Hardy — nor even a Meredith, and the
master ironist of the period was a
Frenchman and his effulgence was
that of a splendid and lingering with-
drawal.

Thus, then, to the period set for all
things by the war. Since the war the
novel, at least the more vivid interest
in its possibilities, has come to this
side of the Atlantic. For although ex-
perimentation still goes on in Eng-
land, more especially among the
younger women novelists, the triumph
of arresting accomplishment seems
for the moment quite departed. And
in this country, though there is any-
thing but a pause, one feels the antici-
patory bustle of the approaching
accouchement rather than the happy
certainty of an actual delivery. Only
the hard pressed newspaper critic and
that indefatigable enthusiast who
97

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

composes the eulogies on "jackets"
any longer believe in the American
novel. Nevertheless we await with
more than usual eagerness those
American novels which will fully jus-
tify the present wide interest in the art
of fiction. America is undoubtedly
waiting to be "done" — adequately, and
a considerable number of excellent
experiments attest the fact that the
writers are either already here or will
shortly appear, who will do the big
fields descriptively, analytically and
synthetically with all the up-to-date
technique (including Freud) and with
something better than "promise."
They will find, indeed, that much ex-
ploratory work has already been ac-
complished unobtrusively by their
elders, though most may seem to de-
mand redoing, as it should in every
generation. And they will also find
(which their elders did not) that the
subject is in a serious mood, willing,
nay anxious to be "done." The Amer-
ican public is now ready and able to
98

THE NEW NOVEL

take an objectively cool and interested
attitude toward the reactions which
it creates in the artist and his result-
ant picture. That will be immensely
helpful to the worker, for in this deli-
cate undertaking there must always
be a close cooperation between the ar-
tist and the sitter. America is ready —
or nearly ready — for a reappraise-
ment and a restatement of herself. . . .
Although this seems to speak en-
couragingly for an interesting and
valid accomplishment before the
younger American novelists, freed
and equipped as I have tried to sug-
gest in the foregoing paragraphs by
the progress of the art through the last
generation, yet it by no means prophe-
sies confidently the coming at once of
great novels or great novelists. For
these depend, I take it, upon certain
elements which in our ordinary dis-
cussions we are only too apt to ignore.
One is upon the spiritual depth of the
soil to be worked. If Main Street is to
date a fair report upon the intelligence
99

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

and the emotional depth of these
United States, by and large (which I
believe it is), then even the greatest
craftsman will have to wait for his
full harvest. One does not make en-
during brick from that straw! But in
the tremulous gropings of our fast
changing time he may not have to
wait long. ... As for the great novel-
ist himself, it is well to remember that
craftsmanship, method and manner
and material too, are but the super-
ficies of a great art. The inner, and
the incalculable factor is the quality of
the individual spirit — the soul (if I
may be permitted to lapse into the
vocabulary of my ancestors). Even
with the novel I think we should be
more interested in that, more con-
cerned with that, than we are with the
matter of the tools employed. We
shall never be content with simply
having our work "done," no matter
how faithfully, nor how dexterously
the artists wield their tools. What we
are waiting for is a new world to be
100

THE NEW NOVEL

revealed to us out of the disguise of
the familiar and the worn through the
spirit of some one who sees deeper
and farther and more understandingly
than we do, into whose vision we can
resign ourselves confidently, as the re-
ligious convert resigns himself upon
the bosom of authority and there
finds the desired relief and freedom.
Frankly I do not see upon the horizon
of my today any evidence of such a
comprehending creator, fit to reveal
the new secrets of this tumultuous
scene, and to impose his own authori-
tative, indubitable sense of its life.
(Now that the great Anatole, alas, is
gathering the last threads of his long
and finely woven skein!) When that
larger personality arrives it wdll make
little difference what his method may
be or his material or where he starts,
whether in Gopher Prairie or New
York, because he will steadily and
surely respin the whole of our uni-
verse from whatever accidental frag-
ments he may happen upon, and will
101

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

consistently people it out of the secret
stores of his own life.

For we must not forget that men
and women, however much at times
they may seem to ignore or even repu-
diate the fact, are more interested in
the inner truth buried somewhere
within their souls, than with all the
outer adjustments and mechanics of
their lives — and the two are only inci-
dentally related.

A NOTE ON THE NOVEL

by
Harvey O'Higgins

IX
A NOTE ON THE NOVEL

The writing of a novel is always a
collaboration — like the production of
any other work of imaginative art.
One of the collaborators is chiefly con-
cerned with form; he takes the mate-
rial offered him by his partner,
chooses among it, arranges it, makes
his pattern with it. The other collab-
orator is largely responsible for scope,
but he affects form by the quality and
abundance of the material he offers
and by the strength of his desire to
have it used. These two collaborators
have had many names in the history
of art. They are now fashionably
known as the conscious mind and the
subconscious. They have been much
studied by the psychologists of late;
the terms of their collaboration, in life
as in art, are becoming more or less
known; and that knowledge is impor-
105

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

tant in any consideration of the form
and scope of the novel.

The conscious mind has been de-
scribed as a sort of hand that has de-
veloped out of the subconscious in
order the better to grasp and manipu-
late reality. As a hand, it is always
busy trying to arrange in some sort of
comprehensible picture the chaos and
muddle of facts around us. It is al-
ways making patterns — patterns of
cause and effect, patterns of natural
law or moral law, patterns of beauty,
patterns of sequence and theme and
recognizable purpose. Into art, it
puts design and symmetry and bal-
ance and symphony and all those
other qualities that make the disorder
of actuality less bewildering to look
upon. It continually leaves outside of
its pattern great numbers of facts
which it can not fit into its immediate
arrangement — and uses these subse-
quently in other patterns. And, under
the name of criticism, it studies its
past patterns and deduces what it
106

A NOTE ON THE NOVEL

calls the laws of art from these per-
formances and tries to make all future
performances conform to those laws.

But the subconscious mind — the
dream mind — seems to have little re-
spect for reality and less for pattern.
It furnishes its material to intelligence
under impulses of its own. It is the
primitive animal mind, emotional,
instinctive and sympathetically intui-
tive. It merely dreams dreams,
making for itself pictures that express
instinctive desires, and apparently get-
ting relief for instinctive tensions in
mere hallucinations of relief. And
the psychic origin and impulse behind
these hallucinations is the need of the
human ego to get its way against real-
ity, to dominate reality in imagination
when it can not dominate in fact.

For these reasons, it seems to me
that there can be no final form in any
art and no set limit to its scope. The
form of the novel will continue to
change as intellect devises new pat-
terns to include new dreams from the
107

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

subconscious; and these dreams will
alter and enlarge the scope of the
novel as the human ego enlarges its
experience of the reality which it is
trying to dominate. The difference
between the romantic novel and the
realistic will be a difference in the
manner of this domination — the real-
ist attempting to subdue reality by
understanding it and the romanticist
to defeat reality by escaping from it.
The humorous fictionist will seek to
raise himself above reality by laugh-
ing at it. The crusading novelist will
make war on reality and try to over-
come it with reforms.

The most popular American novel
in the past has been the romantic, be-
cause the great need of the American
psyche has been to escape the pres-
sure of reality. American humor has
long supported us in a feeling of su-
periority to reality by helping us to
laugh at it. Now the crusading novel
is becoming popular in its appeal to
us to change a reality which we have
108

A NOTE ON THE NOVEL

neither escaped nor laughed out of ex-
istence. It remains for us to produce
an artist — and a public to support him
— who shall seek to dominate reality
by knowing it and understanding it
and accepting it as it is. The future
form and scope of the American novel
will probably be in his hands.

A BRACE OF DEFINITIONS AND A
SHORT CODE

hy
Henry Kitchell Webster

X

A BRACE OF DEFINITIONS AND A
SHORT CODE

There is a wholesome catholicity
about the definition of the novel in
The Concise Oxford: "fictitious prose
narrative of sufficient length to fill
one or more volumes, portraying char-
acters and actions representative of
real life in continuous plot." The two
components in this definition give it a
width of angle inclusive of two easily
distinguishable sorts of work. One of
these relies upon the contrivance of
its pattern for maintaining the read-
er's concern, the performers being
more or less rigidly conventionalized
types. The other appeals to this same
concern through the authenticity of its
characters and their experiences. In
the currency of the day, it is the latter
sort, the novel of character — the por-
trait rather than the decoration,
113

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

which gets itself spoken of as "the
novel" or "the serious novel."

I am aware that I have taken con-
troversial ground in making a classi-
fication froin the reader's point of
view, for many of my younger col-
leagues will hardly admit that the
reader exists, let alone postulate him
as a relevant factor in the affair. In
the light of the brilliant performances
of some of these younger and newer
novelists, one docs well to think twice
before taking issue with them upon
an abstraction of this sort; but I
have thought twice and more than
twice, and to me the thing is funda-
mental.

It seems to me that no act of crea-
tion, whether parthenogenetic or
otherwise, is real unless it gives a
valid objectivity to the created thing;
sets it up by itself, on its own feet, and
leaves it to walk alone, live its own
life, weather its own storms. An act
whicli doesn't result in the projection
and detachment of an objective entity
of some sort isn't a creative act at all
114

A BRACE OF DEFINITIONS

but a mere self-satisfying gesture.
The only objective existence a novel
can have is through its readers, and,
therefore, it is from the point of view
of its readers that it must be judged.
It must be judged by itself, without
reference to its creator; it must have
articulation enough in its own bones
to enable it to stand alone, and vitality
enough between its own covers to
keep it alive.

That's plain enough, I think, so far,
but it leaves the novelist in a diffi-
culty; confronts him, anyhow, with a
demand for a rather fine distinction.
Does this objective theory of the novel
imply a contact between the novelist
and his reader? I believe it does, but
I hasten to qualify this admission by
saying that the only reader whose ap-
probation the novelist has any con-
cern with is himself. But himself as
reader not as author. He must write
what he likes, but he must make what
he writes intelligible to a stranger
whose likes and feelings and associa-
tions are similar to his own.
115

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

Writing thus, for his alter ego, he
gives himself, of course, dead away,
and his courage in giving himself
dead away is the measure of his seri-
ousness. If he writes up to a supe-
rior reader or down to an inferior
reader, he is equally a snob and the
truth is not in him.

I'd like, with the wedge of another
definition, to split once more the half
log we have left. There are still two
sorts of novel a man may write, deter-
mined not so much by the selection of
his character material as by his atti-
tude toward that material. He may
select unfamiliar types and inake
their unfamiliarity the attractive thing
about them. He relies, if he does this,
upon what a city editor would call the
news value of his characters. He ac-
cents their distinctive speech, eti-
quette, point of view. If he does it
plausibly, he gives his readers a sense,
not always illusory either, of being in-
creased in worldly wisdom, of becom-
ing cosmopolites. At least they are
116

A BRACE OF DEFINITIONS

personally conducted tourists, and, if
the conductor knows his business,
they have a wonderful time. They go
back-stage; they visit western ranches,
middle-western small towns, Holly-
wood, the Latin Quarter, India; they
learn the distinctive slang of the
chorus girl, the cowboy, the hick, the
British subaltern and his Mrs.
Hauxbee.

It is possible, even in dealing with
this unfamiliar material, to put the
stress on the other foot, accenting and
revealing not the surface strangeness
of these aliens but their underlying
common humanity. "Folks," Sinclair
Lewis says very earnestly, "are folks.
The hobo, the itinerant tailor and the
hick, just as much as the college pro-
fessor, the business man and the soci-
ety woman." And conversely, of
course — though I never have heard
Mr. Lewis say this — the college pro-
fessor, the business man and the soci-
ety woman as much as the hobo, the
tailor and the hick. So this question
117

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

asks itself; why, if common humanity
is a novelist's concern, should he go
afield to look for it?

The critical fashion of the day pro-
scribes the exceptional. Unless the
novelist wishes to rest under the im-
putation of romanticizing, let him
write about commonplace people, dull
inarticulate earthbound people, and
let him courageously make them as
dull and inarticulate and earthbound
as the majority of mankind admit-
tedly are. Let their deeds be still-
born and their conversation mere un-
grammatical adumbrations of their
unrecognized desires.

Is it heresy to ask whether this sort
of thing is not tourist fiction just as
the cowboy and chorus girl stuff is
tourist fiction? Of course, nobody is
a cowboy to himself, nor a chorus girl.
Is any one a dull earthbound clod? Is
the brave j'oung radical who writes
about earthbound clods, emphasizing
their dull inexpressiveness — is he, to
himself, dull and inarticulate and
118

A BRACE OF DEFINITIONS

earthbound? He is not. He is an ex-
ceptional person. He is so excep-
tional that dullness fascinates him.
He is so expressive that inarticulate-
ness has a news value for him.

My professional code boils down to
about this:

The novelist should give his work
form and structure enough to make it
intelligible to others than himself. He
should write at his own level, neither
up nor down. He should not flinch
from giving himself away. He should
irate at higher value the experience
which, in the natural course of things,
comes his way than that experience
which he has gone looking for. He
should not overrate the importance of
ideas. He should not despise his char-
acters. He should try to make every
word and act of his characters con-
cretely true, and let universality
alone, for nothing ever was universal
that began by trying to be.

SPLITTING FICTION THREE WAYS

by
William Allen White

XI
SPLITTING FICTION THREE WAYS

Any attempt to place the novel in-
side of definitions, setting its meets
and bounds, brings us up sharply
against the insistent question asked of
old and never answered, "What is
art?" And for himself, and his cos-
mos, one man's guess at the answer is
as good as another's, probably rather
better. For every man has his own
scheme of creation. Every man is set
down alone under the stars and on the
more or less solid earth, to build out
of his conscious experience the fabric
of the dream in which he walks. If he
sets down some account of his dream,
some definition of his universe in
terms of love or fear or hate or joy
or any emotional medium in which
his conviction comes to him about life,
what he makes, for him is art. But it
is of necessity not art for any one else.
123

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

It may be an obscure picture on the
sand, drawn with a shell or stick. It
may be a Poem of Ecstasy or it may be
a cathedral or a large fat Mrs. Rubens
in oil, or a patent Madame X. leisurely
waiting for the laundry wagon to
bring her first aid in the matter of
clothes ! Whatever it may be, to some
man the thing means a conviction
about the meaning of life. To its cre-
ator, if to no other soul on earth, the
thing created in joy or pain or fear or
love or whatever rise of pulse beat,
means art. Others, of course, need
not accept it as art; being in ribald
spirits they may laugh at it, or other-
wise, being miean and supercilious
they may try to suppress and censor
the man's expression, which may seem
to others ugly or indecent, or stupid
or wicked beyond tears. But whether
they censor it in laughter or in rage,
they must not forget that for the man
who made it the thing was art. He
has a right to issue his challenge to the
world and stand or fall by it.
124

SPLITTING FICTION THREE WAYS

So any man's novel has its rights.
Its rights are limited. We don't have
to read it, thank Heavens! We don't
have to approve it, having read it.
We have the royal privilege of declar-
ing that the author is a fool; that no
such world as he has tried to depict
ever did or could or should exist;
which being translated only means
that the novelist does not see our
world. But, as fellow travelers in a
number of different universes, and
varying stages of cosmic environment,
we have no right as potential artists
to deny him the right to print and
peddle the poor thing that is his own.

Now, here we come to the doctrine
of a democratic theory in criticism.
And we must come to it when we ad-
mit a Variety of different worlds sur-
rounding the consciousness of human
beings. Now, this democratic theory
of criticism like all democratic theo-
ries and doctrines is based upon a
principle of tolerance, of mutual re-
spect, of neighborly kinship in the cos-
125

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

mos. And if we follow a democratic
theory of criticism art must not de-
velop a snobbery, in its lower levels,
in, say, the level of criticism. To set
up rigid standards, to make inexor-
able rules, to apply static tests, to ac-
cept or reject any man's account of
the world in which he lives as false
and foolish is dangerous. Also demo-
cratically it is unfair. A number of
critics affect to giggle at the novels of
Mr. Harold Bell Wright. Their fathers
sniffed at Bertha M. Clay. To
some of us Mr. Wright does seem to
walk among chromos as one who lives
in a vast forest of Sunday supple-
ments. And there are those who feel
that Mr. Theodore Dreiser's world is
afflicted with misanthropy and
worms. As between a world of
"Simply to Thy Cross I Cling" done in
gaudy colors and a world painted
from the mud of a pig pen many an
average man or woman shrinks from
choice. It is not a question of art.
There is no more art in Sister Carrie
126

SPLITTING FICTION THREE WAYS

for instance than in Pollyanna. It is
largely a question of the world in
which the authors move, of the phi-
losophy of life which inspires the writ-
er. And Sister Carrie may well be as
false as Pollyanna in its philosophy.
Life is doubtless highly carrieful — to
coin a word — for Mr. Dreiser, and for
Mrs. Porter it is surely pollyaneous;
but for a lot of us it is neither. We
trek along on the middle plane out of
the heights where Pollyanna walks in
trailing clouds of glory, and above the
depths where Sister Carrie sloshes in
the mud and muck. Possibly these
middle averages toddle about with
Alice Adams.

So let us for the sake of illustration
say that broadly there abide these
three views of modern American life
personified by these three estimable
young women. Sister Carrie, Polly-
anna and Alice Adams. They per-
sonify rather distinctive groups in our
novel reading public. Possibly the
groups represent stratifications in the
127

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

matter of view-point of life found in
our book buying public. Why has not
each crowd the right to its own opin-
ion, and why should the exponents of
either group stick up their noses at
the others? If it pleases the Freeman
as the exponent of soured and pickled
brains and heart and genital intestines
to purvey that kind of wares — say lit-
erary tripes and caviar — well and
good. The soured soul market is a
trifle slow; but it is steady and seems
to be growing. Then why try to stim-
ulate it by affecting that those who
deal in spiritual marshmallows under
the Wright or Porter brand are igno-
rant venders of adulterated goods?
And why insist that those who make
and sell common cooking food — say
Roast Beef Medium, for example — are
base vulgarians. There is no particu-
lar virtue either of craftsmanship, in
the making, or in tlie salesmanship in
the selling as between those who
handle gamy tripe, or marshmallows,
or baker's bread. And the snobbery
128

SPLITTING FICTION THREE WAYS

of the tripe makers is as unjustifiable
as the unction of King's Daughters at
the marshmallow counter. And as
for the disdain of the prune and po-
tato peddler, the workers in the other
two departments of spiritual refresh-
ment, it is positively wicked; if the
tripe department will permit the use
even in rhetoric of a word implying
the existence of right and wrong.

Why can we not have a democracy
in our art, and let posterity hang on
whatever rewards, prizes or pre-
miums it may choose? The novel is
only one form of that outward eva-
nescent expression of our emotions
which pass for art. Music, poetry,
painting, sculpture, architecture, pos-
sibly the despised movies, the drama
and home making all are reflecting
the things that are passing in our
hearts. And we have many hearts,
and are making "many inventions."
For the most part they are fleeting
shadows, whether upon the silver
screen or in bronze or stone and steel.
129

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

They pass as we pass. Why quarrel
over the forms into which we cast our
heart's desire? Why waste our time
setting up a fleeting aristocracy in our
art? Why make broad our critical
phylacteries, why enlarge the borders
of our literary garment? Why the
Dial?

We can cry ourselves black in the
face to catch the ear of posterity; but
posterity will make its own judgments
about us. For that matter is it highly
important that posterity shall know
us? Other generations have passed
without leaving a mark in the sand.
Why should we care which mark
identifies us, whether Harold Bell
Wright's or Booth Tarkington's or
Sherwood Anderson's? Neither tells
all about us. Each tells much.
And the degree of truth in each man's
story would seem hardly worth wran-
gling about a hundred years hence.
The difference between Winesburg,
Ohio and The Shepherd of the Hills,
or between either and The Bent Twig
130

SPLITTING FICTION THREE WAYS

or A Hazard of New Fortunes may not
be so important to the reader of the
next century as it may seem to the
reader today. And all the hundreds
of thousands of copies of The Shep-
herd printed and sold would avail it
less if possible in the next century
than all the critical claque for Wines-
burg, Ohio. The two or three decades
of immortality of The Hazard and
The Twig will not help them in that
great day of judgment.

It is all vanity of vanities and vexa-
tion of spirit, this price making for
posterity, this attempt to say what is
good and what bad with the miserable
rules and standards which we are set-
ting up today. The novel is for the
day, as the newspaper or the sky-
scraper or the park monument is. It
finds its market in spite of our rules
of art. Each novel circulates upon its
own level. Its public knows it instinc-
tively. Those seeking marshmallow
novels never buy tripe or caviar, nor
prunes. And the closed shop among
131

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

the clerks and artisans in the literary
candy trade, in the fictional packing
house, or in the grocery store of novel
making, does not stimulate more or
better produce, nor wider and more
intelligent marketing. The Pharisee-
ism of the workers in the craft merely
makes the consumer smile. He buys
what he wants, follows his philosophy,
chases his mood, or scents the desir-
able fodder of the moment. The
novel he buys tells him what he wishes
to know; and something more. Good
or bad it fills him with the spiritual
pabulum that he needs. At the mo-
ment of his purchase he would reject
the kinds found in other books. And
gradually as he gets a bellyful, he goes
upward and onward, or downward
and outward in his tastes and desires,
until if he keeps on reading for a life-
time he knows about all that our
novels have to tell him — all kinds of
them. Then reading has made him a
full man. That is the best hope we
can have for him. To that end the
132

SPLITTING FICTION THREE WAYS

woodsman, the millman, the paper
dealer, the printer, the binder, the
bookseller, and the writer are working.
And in the business "all service ranks
the same with God!"

"DREAMING TRUE"
Edith Franklin Wyatt

XII

'DREAMING TRUE'

From time to time dialogues be-
tween enterprising reporters and
authors visiting this country gladden
the pages of the daily press. Among
these I remember reading some years
ago an opinion on novels which has
always interested me.

The reporter mentioned to the visit-
ing author a novel presenting a bril-
liant delineation of a newspaper-
writer who becomes a drug-fiend.

"The book is greatly over-rated,"
the visiting author replied. "Why
this newspaper-writer — the hero — is
only a second-rate man ! I should not
care to ask him to my home to lunch."

Think of the "noted names of fic-
tion" who could not survive this
simple test. Consider the imaginary
figures that you can not picture as en-
137

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

joying lunch with your relatives, and
with whom your relatives could not
enjoy lunching. "I should not care
to ask him (her) to my home to
lunch." Goneril — or Regan either — »
Bill Sikes, Gilbert Osmond, Medea,
Werther, Bradley Headstone, any of
the people in Wiithering Heights — '

Without indulging myself further in
regarding this or other aspects of this
quick test of the value of fiction I will
hasten to say that the chief reason
why it seems so dismal an absurdity is
perhaps because it could only serve to
cut off the visiting author from the
most profoundly entertaining experi-
ence fiction offers. This is, for me at
least, the experience of "dreaming
true," the experience of being some
one else, of being a hundred, a thou-
sand other people.

2

This interest in becoming somebody
else has never seemed to me to arise
from seeking novels as an "escape"
138

"DREAMING TRUE"

from real life or from one's own life.
One enjoys the power of identification
with the million-peopled cosmos of
novels not for the negative reason of
seeking an escape but because the
exercise of this power is a positive
pleasure in itself, comparable to the
pleasure of looking at well-composed
colors, or of hearing sound beautifully
ordered.

If one can not ask every one to lunch,
if one can not meet, converse with, live
with, identify oneself with every kind
of human life in the pages of a novel,
then there is no place in the world
where one can ask every one to lunch,
meet every one, converse with, live
with, identify oneself with every form
of human life.

This is in my belief the chief dis-
tinctive contribution that the art of
the novel makes to the life of the
mind. In the other arts of letters the
reader is more or less a listener, and
part of the audience. In the art of the
novel he is a participant.
139

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

Yet, besides this there are of course
many elements of existence — too
many to mention — which are the pecu-
liar province of the novel; many kinds
of truth that no other form of letters
is so well fitted to express.

A way of life over a long space of
time; the change of community opin-
ion; the contrast of social groups; the
several aspects of one man's or wom-
an's nature; a correction of vision and
gradual revelation; the development
of human resources; above all the
free and fecund power of life, its vari-
ety, its improvisational force in virtue
of which one situation grows out of
another in many-colored, creative
continuance — these are some of the
many truths that the novel tells best.

After he had been left by his thin-
hearted wife, Lavretzky in Turgenev's
Liza returns to live on and manage his
father's estate:

There under the window climbs the
large-leaved burdock from the thick
grass. . . . Farther away in the fields
140

"DREAMING TRUE"

shines the rye, and the oats are al-
ready in ear, and every leaf or tree,
every blade of grass on its stalls
stretches out to its fullest extent. ''On
a woman's love my best years have
been wasted," Lavretzky proceeded to
think. "Well, then, let the dullness
here sober me and calm me down; let
it educate me into being able to work
like others without hurrying." And he
again betook himself to listening to
the silence without expecting any-
thing, and yet, at the same time, as if
expecting something. The stillness
embraced him on all sides; the sun
went down quietly in a calm, blue
sky. ... In other parts of the world
at that very moment life was seething
noisily bestirring itself. Here was the
same life flowed silently along, like
water over meadow-grass. It was late
in the evening before Lavretzky could
tear himself away from the contem-
plation of this life so quietly welling
forth — so tranquilly flowing past.
Sorrow for the past melted in his
mind as the snow melts in spring; but
strange to say, never had the love of
home exercised so strong or so pro-
found an influence upon him.

This has for me the singular magic
of the novel's faculty for quietly well-
141

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

ing forth, the profound charm of a
work in which each part of the tale
develops and enhances what has gone
before, and is the moving prelude of
what is to come.

Many instances occur to one of the
genius of novelists in employing the
unique opportunity the form affords
for spacious original design. One
thinks of the magnificent river-jour-
ney at the close of Tono-Bungay
where one rides and rides past the
high-piled tokens of changing civiliza-
tion out and out to the open sea from
which one looks back with emotion at
the lives of George and of Edward
Ponderevo as seen from afar now,
through a veil of reflection on the
greater ways of mortal dream and
and destiny.

One thinks of the tremendous scene
of the wild populace at the guillotin-
ing at Auxerre in The Old Wives' Tale,
as contrasted with the staid persons
and streets of the Five Towns whence
Sophia Baines has come to stand at
142

"DREAMING TRUE"

her hotel-window and look forth in
disgust and fascination.

One thinks of the wide, bright tide
of world-letters and word-criticism
bearing Wilhelm Meister through his
Lehr-und Wanderjahre; and of Dau-
det's Sappho wdth the painter Corot
touched in among the guests at that
brilliant ball in one of the opening
chapters. Vista, panorama, multi-
tude, spontaneous succession — all
these the novel tells us supremely.

3

The changing world of novels is full
of surprises. One will have thought
that, in general, literary fashions are
rather unrewarding and tend to cheap
standardizations of material. Then
suddenly a literary fashion will be
productive of admirable results. Or
perhaps it would be more precise to
say that often some new theme
chances to be excellently expressed at
about the same time by many
novelists.

143

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

Thus the past season has been es-
pecially rich in the criticism of hus-
bands and fathers. Inspired expo-
sures have occurred on all sides — the
exposure of Herbert Dwight Deacon,
the exposure of Mr. Weemys in Vera
and the exposure of Mr. Waddington.
Among these Herbert Dwight Deacon
is the most liberally treated by the
author. This is to the good, as liber-
ality is seriously needed by the male
characters of fiction where they are
too often disfranchised and appear
purely in a vicarious relation as sons,
fathers, husbands or lovers.

This vicarious discriminatory man-
ner of regarding men in fiction is es-
pecially noticeable in the character of
Tito Melema. Seen solely from the
standpoint of his exceedingly feeble
abilities as a lover, Tito, though phys-
ical beauty is almost too richly lav-
ished upon him by his creator, has
never the slightest chance as a human
being. Always in a miserable subor-
dinate state as a mere adjunct of Ro-
144

"DREAMING TRUE"

mola he is never for an instant per-
mitted to come forward except on the
depressing grounds of love and beauty
and as a sort of male houri. His posi-
tion is far more discouraging than
that of Nora in A Doll's House. And
one need only compare Ninian Dea-
con's treatment as a bigamist by his
creator to Tito's treatment as a biga-
mist by his creator to appreciate the
increase of enfranchisement for males
in fiction.

Perhaps it is because of the recent
overshadowing appreciation of Miss
Lulu Belt that one has not heard
much of an extremely beautiful and
original novel of Miss Zona Gale's en-
titled Birth,

It is the story of a "superfluous
man" in a Wisconsin town, the story
of a whole town of men and w^omen, a
place most individually perceived.
Yet its outline has some of the national
angles of the town that imprisoned
Thoreau, and where Stephen Crane
saw the tragedy of The Monster,
145

THE NOVEL OF TOMORROW

Years flow by and the changes of
years. Death is here and love and
pain, all touched with swift ironic hu-
mor. Each soul is imagined by this
humor, and in the wisdom of truth
intimate and profound. The neigh-
bors walk past in the evening — the
wise, the silly, the generous, the small.
The band plays. The trains thunder
overland. And you walk in sun and
rain where

Burage numbers her trees by thou-
sands. In the morning the sun comes
in strong gold, lavished upon the
grass, save where the leaves lay their
bright veils. All the narrow green
strips outside the walks turn bright.

In rain the town, like any other, ly-
ing folded in a visible medium, be-
comes an enclosure cut off from some-
thing. Rooms become more intimate.
Something ceases, and something is
present instead.

You walk under the thousand-num-
bered trees over the November pave-
ments. The possibilities of your fast-
flying life hurry past you unrealized;
146

"DREAMING TRUE"

and at their passage you despair and
laugh at yourself and hope again.
Your heart burns at the mean injus-
tice of existence, its petty cruelty and
hardness to those who are forgotten
upon earth. Sometimes I have
thought every splendid novel is about
justice and injustice. This novel has
the presence of genius. When you
read it something ceases; and some-
thing is present instead.

It has the power of social imagina-
tion, the light which beyond any other
illumines the art of the novel; and
makes us hope ever to dream more
truly of all the mortal fortunes in our
world.

THE END

PA)

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